Please note we will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) browser soon which is used by 0.6% of users. This is an advance warning so IE7 users can upgrade to IE8/9 and preferably IE10 which is a very good browser.

The mobile website keeps saying that the bookmarks of the authors that I have bookmarked are outdated links but when I search their names on the mobile website, it comes up. Do you know what may be wrong?

What is wrong with the favoriting the stories? I just want to add a good stories to my favorite,but it told me “We are unable to process your request due to an network error. Please try again later.”,what is wrong with it.

Thank you to the individual who was polite when pointing out I had used the wrong language. Let’s see if I have it correct this time. I run IE 7. There will be no updating to IE 8 or further due to conflicts with my assistive tech. There will be no using a secondary browser. Please explain briefly the consequences of removal of support for IE 7.

The reason browsers get dropped by sites is because said browsers become out of date and it becomes harder and harder to program them to the point it becomes impossible. Even DA, which has some of the best graphic web designers have had to come out and say they’re dropping certain browsers because their time is better spent on other things.

The consequences are you’re going to have more and more problems accessing the site as the site admins update things. Eventually you’ll need to update to a better browser, maybe even get a new computer if need be. If getting a new computer is the issue I suggest that you start saving for it, being that eventually other sites will stop supporting IE7 as well. Don’t worry though until it becomes a major issue I think, but understand that the site admins won’t do anything about glitches involving said browser.

This isn’t mind you because they are trying to be anti-user friendly. As I said above, there is only so much a person can do programing wise when browsers become out of date.

Thank you, Yemi Hikari. This is the first time I have received notification of a growing incompatibility due to the aging out of IE7. I’m reassured my access will not suddenly disappear. The computer isn’t the problem, smile, it’s the tech.

cathy massey

09/14/2013 at 7:15 pm

to Yemi Hikarii, 5:20pm post

I go online during breaks at my job. We just down-graded from Windows XP to Windows 7 a few months ago – a few machines still have XP and they are much nicer to use.

Point is – not everyone can change browsers or load ad-blocking software at their own discretion. I understand that it’s impossible to expect the folks at their end to accommodate every edition of every web browser out there, and I would never expect anyone to try, but please understand that not all of us are entirely in control of what we download or how we interface with the online world.

Fortunately, most of these machines also have Mozilla FireFox. Guess I’ll be using it a lot more, now.
Chrome is also available on most of the machines, but is universally hated – it’s not noticeably faster than Windows or FireFox and printing is lousy.

When I found this site, there were ads that would spread across the whole screen for several seconds. Now that they’re gone, I don’t mind the presence of ads at the top and bottom of pages, although I have noticed the (futile) attempts of tracking software to match me up with tempting ads.

However, the sleaziness of some of the gaming ones makes me glad that my sister blocks this site from her kids (ages 11 – 15). I’m wondering when either those ads or the slash fiction will push our work filters to the limits of their tolerance.

cathrl

09/04/2013 at 3:30 am

Kidwrangler, I’d suggest you email support directly and see if they can advise what browsers they support which will work with your assistive tech. I know they’ve put in specific measuresbefore, for instance to help blind users who have screenreaders, so it’s worth letting them know what you use as no site can ever support everything.

Last time I checked the site admins had rules about proper formatting and one of the rules in formatting is to not use chunky paragraphs. Of course, I believe you’re talking about a mobile device and how it sees so what may be a chunky paragraph via that device might actually not be one.

I doubt the site admins will allow the download of fanfiction. While it is true that people can copy paste plagiarism now, one of the types of plagiarism we rarely see is the kind where people forget whose story they downloaded and uploaded it as their own. This used to occur a lot more back when fanfiction was still traded via lists.

Why not just contact the author (via review or PM) to inform them their formatting leaves something to be desired? The only times I see stories with big chunks of text is when the author is new to writing fanfic (and often young) and as soon as someone points out that the formatting makes it unreadable, they tend to change it into something more aesthetically pleasing. The only problem with that is, of course, they often don’t know how they’re supposed to write a paragraph and thus split the story up in random places but at least it’s less of an eyesore and there are plenty of readers who don’t seem to care about quality anyway.

You could also just ask the author if they wouldn’t mind sending you a full copy of the story in a doc/pdf/ebook format.

Of course this requires that the author is able to produce pdfs or docs.

The latter is impossible for me, as I have got nothing that smells, tastes, looks, sounds, or feels like Word.

Many of my stories are written are in LaTeX, which is primarily a typesetting language. Pdf generation is thus easy for me in this case, using the standard toolchains of TeX. Some of the pdf versions of my stories thusly generated are available on my wordpress account.

On the other hand, latex is not really intended for creating web sites, although it can be done in some more or less quirky ways.

The way from the latex files to the thoroughly restricted subset of html allowed in ffnet is extremely lossy. All informations required for appropriate hyphenisation and pagination get lost beyond recovery. Internal cross references get mangled, blockquotes get misrepresented, chapter and section headings are poorly discernable as such, typewriter fonts, small capital fonts, relative font sizes, colours, and so on, get lost. The most severe blunder happens to my numbered footnotes.

Requiring a pdf from me is thus vastly preferrable to creating one from a downloaded ffnet file. It’s even better to request the tex source files, as this allows for tweaking many details of the presentation such as paper size, margin width, colour schemes, and so on. But this is only viable for those who understand some LaTeX, and have got a suitable TeX installation at hand.

schillingklaus

09/04/2013 at 9:18 am

You can simply save the html file of the story chapter on your own hard drive, and then convert it to pdf with suitable programs.

I just print out some things. It’s easier on the eyes and cheaper than buying an electronic reader, and the ones I’ve seen friends and family use are too fragile, finicky, and short-lived to tempt me anyway.

I can control the size of the print, hold paper at a more comfortable angle than the screen, read during a long commute, and drop it in recycling when I reach my station.

It beats reading a story in 15 -45 minute sessions on breaks.

Things print very well in Windows XP and Mozilla FireFox, pretty well in Windows 7 once we got through some teething pains and horribly in Chrome. (although there have been one or two recent glitches in Windows 7 that, it’s just dawning on me, may be related to the cessation of support).